I've played a lot of other mmos and rpg games that follow this kind of theme, sword, magic, big battles and set in big magical worlds. And I got to be honest, well they all have there own element of what makes them good (or not so good), one thing warcraft does that the others doesn't is diversity in races.

In many other mmorpgs or rpgs of this kind of genre, you end up having just human races, or elf races, or just your basic varient of humans with maybe slightly less human features, but still, they don't fall far from the tree. Games like rift, warhammer, starwars, elder scrolls, they all have there own unique quality, but what they lack for me is that diversity of races wow has.
Even games that take right from wow itself by design, like allods online, has two human races in it, and a couple of other ones.

When it comes down to unique characterization and design for races, nothing really can beat wow for choice. Sure we can't modify our chosen race to be bigger or smaller, but given the diversity of races in the game it doesn't make it feel like we're just choosing a clone of the last 50 other players.

And of course the style. Warcraft for how it stands, is VERY much a comic book themed art style. The kind of artwork you'd be use to seeing in DC and Marvel comics, you see it here, the ingame design doesn't try to make things look real, but it treats it seriously enough to give depth to the characters we play as, just like a comic book artist would give to the characters they draw, without making them completely realistic.
And thats the charm of the characters in wow. There not designed to be real, but they have there own seriousness to them set in there own universe.

to that end, anyone who ever read comics and thought 'man wonder woman is so hot!' or 'I wish hulks purple pants would rip off too', world of warcraft fits the bill perfectly for that kind of people. And as it seems, there are more people playing mmo's who appreciate this kind of character design then they let on to, millions of them infact.

This is why i like the bulky characters like draenei, tauren and orcs, because I don't need to think serious with them in design, I can just appreciate there look the same as I did when I read x-men and the super pumped heroes in spandex flashed across the pages.

This is a weird one and Im about to get weird. In terms of bothe male and female I like Orc, Belves and Draenei. Female only I like Pandaren, Goblins, Gnomes(Chromie is the only gnome I really like), Nelves and humans.